By ANDREW DUFFY
Ottawa Citizen
Postmedia and the Ottawa Citizen today unveil a reinvention of the local news business based on a “four-platform strategy” more than two years in the making.
The strategy represents a bold investment in the future at a time when many newspapers are retrenching under pressure from an industry-wide slump in ad revenue.
Postmedia CEO Paul Godfrey says the ground-breaking initiative shatters the old newspaper mold once and for all. “We are now, emphatically, a news media company: we’re going to look back years from now and say this was a critical point in the transformation of newspapers.”
That transformation begins with today’s newspaper and extends to the Ottawa Citizen’s website, its tablet and smartphone editions. The four platforms will feature news, information and ads created and designed to take advantage of the unique strengths of each medium.
“We’ve reinvented each one of our products from the ground up — from a completely blank canvas,” explains Wayne Parrish, Postmedia’s chief operating officer.
What does that mean for readers? It means they’ll have an unprecedented amount of choice in terms of how they access breaking news, sports, features and analysis, 24 hours a day.
The strategy is grounded in research. Postmedia hired IPSOS Canada to survey more than 17,000 Canadians in eight key Postmedia markets to understand their reading habits: when and how they use their smartphones, tablets, computers and newspapers throughout the day.
What they found was that each platform attracted a different kind of reader: young people overwhelmingly use their smartphones to access news, while middle-aged readers have an enormous appetite for their iPads. The newspaper, not surprisingly, tends to be favoured by those who have grown up with a paper slapped on the porch. Each platform audience wants something unique.
The four-platform strategy requires the content on each platform to be customized to serve the distinct reading habits of its audience.
A look at the new print design of the Ottawa Citizen. Local, full of more context and analysis than ever before.
Let’s start with the newspaper. The Ottawa Citizen has been redesigned to make reading easier and information more accessible. You’ll notice more graphics, information boxes, and fewer long blocks of type. The paper will put an emphasis on context and analysis. It will focus intently on local events which in Ottawa include the drama of Parliament Hill.
Readers who favour a smartphone will be able to find breaking news on the paper’s website — it now adjusts to any screen size — and use an app that has been designed specifically for people who want a news hit while waiting for a bus or the start of a meeting.
The smartphone app offers a constant stream of updated news in a writing style geared to the young, mobile consumer. Stories will be short and snappy with a dash of snark.
The new mobile app is geared to a younger, on-the-go audience.
“Think of Twitter meets talk radio and you probably have an idea of what we’re trying to do. This is news for you on the go,” says Rob McLaughlin, Postmedia’s editorial vice-president for the Prairie region.
Every weekday at 6 p.m., the Ottawa Citizen will also publish an iPad edition that presents the day’s most compelling news and features. With interactive graphics, animation, embedded video and audio, the digital magazine will provide creative new dimensions to the news reading experience. (The iPad edition is available through the Apple iTunes Newsstand.)
The groundbreaking tablet will jump off the screen every night starting at 6 p.m.
A look at the new design of the Ottawa Citizen for tablet.
The Ottawa Citizen’s remodelled website serves as the hub for the three other platforms and offers a place that readers can revisit anytime for updated news, photo galleries and links. All of the platforms will be united by the same crisp, colour-coded design.
The unveiling of the new Ottawa Citizen is part of a massive, chain-wide initiative known as Postmedia Reimagined, which will see similar products introduced by eight of the company’s daily newspapers during the next year. The National Post and Vancouver Province are working on their own redesigns.
The move to a four-platform strategy, introduced during a period of cost-cutting and staff reductions, has been made possible through the launch of One Newsroom. The initiative leverages the combined resources of 10 Postmedia papers to produce a comprehensive national and international file shared across the chain.
Our website, OttawaCitizen.com, remains the hub of everything we do. It’s now responsive so it works spectacularly well on mobile, tablet or desktop.
The collaboration is designed to allow metro papers to concentrate resources on their local news markets.
Parrish says the changes unveiled today are the product of two seemingly contradictory goals: to reinvent a better news organization while cutting costs to deal with the reality of reduced ad revenues. Senior company officials recognized the need to dramatically remake the business soon after Postmedia bought the newspaper chain for $1.1 billion in July 2010.
At the time, revenues across the industry were suffering because of the financial crisis, but it soon became apparent that something more was at play: the media landscape had undergone a seismic shift. In response, in July 2012, Postmedia executives presented the company’s board of directors with an ambitious, two-pronged plan: to cut operating expenses by 15 to 20 per cent over three years, while at the same time making strategic investments in the reinvention of the business.
“We believed we had to completely transform both the product side and the sales side of the company,” said Parrish.
It means not only will Postmedia newspapers deliver on four platforms, they’ll also introduce the kind of targeted digital sales strategies offered by Google, Facebook and Twitter.
“I’ve never in my life worked on anything this big, this complicated, this ambitious.”
- Gerry Nott
The Ottawa Citizen was chosen to lead the reinvention effort since then-Publisher and Editor Gerry Nott had already initiated a redesign of the paper. Nott, now senior vice-president for Postmedia’s eastern region, announced the challenge to a town hall meeting of Ottawa Citizen editorial and advertising staff in early 2013.
“The good news is that we’re first,” he told employees. “The bad news is that we’re first.”
Nott appointed a newsroom champion for each platform. As those champions developed an understanding of the technical and production challenges for each platform, full teams were put in place to address them. The teams immersed themselves in audience research and put together detailed content strategies.
“I’ve never in my life worked on anything this big, this complicated, this ambitious,” said Nott, who has done virtually every job there is at a newspaper at some point during his 35-year career.
Ottawa Citizen Editor Andrew Potter, who inherited the project when he took over the newspaper’s helm in December 2013, said the strategy allows the paper to make itself relevant to more people in an increasingly diverse city. “We’re now able to target specific audiences and demographics in a way we never could before,” Potter said. “I hope readers take away from this the fact that the Citizen continues to find compelling new ways to serve and engage its community.”
A look at the new design of the Ottawa Citizen’s responsive website.
Another look at the new print design of the Ottawa Citizen.